One of the topical issues affecting our generation in the last two decades or so has been climate change and its effects on the environment. All around us, we see and hear of natural disasters like tsunamis, cyclones and earthquakes that have disrupted the lives of people in different parts of the world. In the first week of January 2020, I experienced a snowstorm which brought the small province of St. John’s NL to a halt for almost two weeks, and we got through the storm. However, who amongst us would have imagined the world being brought to a standstill by a global health pandemic? I, for one, never believed it, more so I never thought that a global health pandemic would derail my research plans for doing fieldwork.
I suppose that many of us were looking forward to the new decade as we celebrated the beginning of 2020. For some people like me, it was a year that I anticipated the completion of my comprehensive exams and the start of my fieldwork in Zimbabwe, Southern Africa. It was an exciting time for me, and as I was in the process of completing my exams in February 2020, I always thought of my first class as a graduate student. One of the faculty members gave us a philosophical piece by Thomas Kuhn on the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Until today, it is one of the most challenging academic pieces I have encountered.
The lecturer argued that he gave us the problematic piece for our first-class because it acted as our “initiation or rite of passage” into graduate school. It was a way to mark a difference between undergraduate studies and graduate school. Similarly, my completion of the comps was another rite of passage which marked my progress from being a PhD student to a PhD candidate. I am sure for those who have completed their comps they resonate with these sentiments of a rite of passage because the experience is highly structured, marked by different forms of independence and tests of quality and performance. The completion of this initiation process is one to celebrate and marks the change in your academic status.
Although I celebrate the completion of my comps, I find myself in that stage which the famous anthropologists Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner termed the “liminal phase.” This is the phase in which you leave one stage but have not yet entered or joined the next stage. It is characterised by a lot of uncertainty and unknown future outcomes. As some other graduate students patiently wait for COVID-19 to subside so that they travel and can start their fieldwork in different parts of the world, they might find themselves in this similar liminal phase. You might ask yourself, what next for me, how am I going to go through this, and will I finish my program in time? You might also be thinking, “if it were not for the health pandemic, I would be somewhere across the globe doing my fieldwork and almost seeing the completion of my work in the horizon”, but alas here we are.
However, do not stress too much. I have come to think of COVID-19 not as a challenge and drawback to doing fieldwork but as another rite of passage which challenges us as graduate students to reinvent ourselves and think innovatively about how we do research. Instead of focusing on how I would be working with people in communities across the globe, I now focus on different strategies I can use to gather data for my research without being physically present in my study area. I have found ways to interact with my participants online and even discover new ways of using research methods like focus groups in fun yet informative ways. So, let us not worry about doing fieldwork during a global pandemic, but let us see it as an opportunity that helps us to grow and transition into better academics, thus, completing our lifecycle as graduate students.
